On Thursday, February 9, 2012 two large, angry groups — in separate parts of Los Angeles — protested against LAUSD, for two different reasons. At Miramonte Elementary School, around a hundred angry parents and students protested the transfer of the entire staff — teachers, janitors, everybody — to a new school still under construction, while an entirely new staff was brought in, at a reported cost of $5.7 million. The parents and students complained of the disruptive effects of this radical response to child abuse allegations against two teachers. Meanwhile, outside LAUSD Headquarters at 333 S. Beaudry Avenue in Los Angeles, over two thousand angry teachers and adult students protested the threatened elimination of LAUSD’s adult and career education programs, which serve over 300,000 students.
Both demonstrations protested disruption — one disruption costing the cash-strapped district close to $6 million, the other disruption ostensibly intended to save the district money. Saving money, spending money… maybe they were beside the point. Maybe the real goal was the disruption itself.
It seems ludicrous to even suggest that the superintendent of a large public school system would purposely cause disruption in the school district he or she had been chosen to run. Ludicrous, that is, until one looks into the background of LAUSD Superintendent Dr. John Deasy, a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy.
Do a Bing search by typing “Deasy” and “Broad,” and the first thing you get is this:
http://www.broadacademy.org/fellows/303_John+Deasy.html?page_filter=0
According to that official website, John Deasy is a proud 2006 graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, a 10-month part-time program that “identifies and prepares prominent leaders — executives who have experience successfully leading large organizations and a passion for public service — then places them in urban school districts to dramatically improve the quality of education for America’s students.”
This all seems quite laudable, until you look down the list of “hits” on that Bing search. Here’s #2:
http://thebroadreport.blogspot.com/2011/03/john-deasy-broad-superintendents.html
At the top of that blog, the “Broad Report,” you get this quote : “What is happening in large urban districts today has been carefully orchestrated by vulture philanthropists.” That’s from Susan Ohanian, author of One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards.
The “Broad Report” is full of unpleasantness about Eli Broad, including a rather sour look at his main cash cow, KB Homes, whose chief executive — Bruce Karatz — in 2010 was brought up on twenty felony charges including securities fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud and making false statements in securities filings. He was convicted on charges of backdating stock options. (Details: Bruce Karatz found guilty on stock option backdating charges)
As one Michael Fiorillo wrote, commenting on an article about Eli Broad in http://gothamschools.org:
“It’s revealing that Broad earned the first of his many fortunes building gated communities and subdivisions in white flight suburbs of Southern California. Originally named Kaufman and Broad, the company is now known as KB Homes, the stock of which is a major part of his foundation’s endowment.
“So, a fortune created by federally subsidized housing inequalities is then channeled into a tax exempt foundation that funds the dismantling of the public schools and creation of a separate and unequal education system. It’s almost like a perpetual motion machine, as designed by Mephistopheles.”
Click to the right for more on Michael Fiorillo’s observation.
Broad is well known to favor charter schools, and by some odd coincidence, his superintendents also seem to favor charters schools. In LAUSD, board members who were elected to the school board largely through Broad money have routinely voted in favor of charter schools. More on charter schools at another time, God willing. But back to “Dr.” John Deasy.
The first post in the “Broad Report” blog asserts that John Deasy left a superintendent job in Prince George, Maryland three weeks after being investigated regarding the validity of his doctorate. He then took a job with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which offers a public school reform program that has been criticized for favoring charter schools and over-emphasizing the use of standardized test scores in evaluating students, teachers, and educational programs. Some critics point out that the Gates Foundation exerts undue influence over public education policy without being accountable to either voters or taxpayers.
Deasy was hired by LAUSD in 2010, and only six months later promoted to Superintendent, in a process that seems, in retrospect, rather hasty and ill-considered. There was no job interview. To my knowledge, Dr. Deasy never had to answer any hard, job-interview-type questions. The LAUSD school board voted 6-0 to hire Dr. Deasy, with only one abstention: Steve Zimmer, Board District 4. (Full disclosure: I helped elect Zimmer to the school board by phone-banking at UTLA headquarters.) Regarding Deasy’s selection as superintendent, Mr. Zimmer commented later for the L.A. Weekly: “We didn’t have a process — internal or external — for the most important job in public education in the United States… I can’t be sure that I got the best person for the job if I didn’t get to even talk to anybody else.” According to the L.A. Weekly, “Mayor Villaraigosa was ‘making all the moves behind the scenes to make [Deasy’s promotion] happen.'” This would be consistent with Antonio Villaraigosa’s well-known ambition to control LAUSD.
But. Other unpleasant questions linger in the matter of Dr. John Deasy.
First, there are still those questions as to the validity of his Ph.D.
Second, apparently there were inconsistencies in his resume that still haven’t been resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned.
Then there was the small matter of his having been trained by the Broad academy, which has garnered a great deal of unfavorable press in some circles.
In a February 20, 2012 article in Education Week, Cristina A. Samuels speaks with educators who see Broad’s academy and his pressure on public education as “a destructive force.” Samuels’s article was reprinted in the Christian Science Monitor:
Critics of Broad’s academy accuse his superintendents of running school districts like corporations, trying to destroy unions, excluding parents from the decision-making process, and pushing educational reforms that haven’t been proven by research or successful implementation.
One of Broad’s critics, Sharon Higgins, started The Broad Report in 2009 after the Oakland (California) school district went through three Broad-trained superintendents one after another. (Each was a state appointee.)
The Samuels article says of Higgins,
She said she grew alarmed when she started seeing principals and teachers whom she called “high-quality, dedicated people” forced out. She contends in her blog that Broad superintendents are trained to aim for “maximum disruption” when they come to a district, without regard for parent and teacher concerns.
“It’s like saying, let me come to your house and completely rearrange your furniture, because I think your house is a mess,” Ms. Higgins said, adding that other parents around the country have reached out to her to complain about their own Broad-trained school leaders.
According to Erica Lepping, spokeswoman for the Broad Foundation, the academy promotes a management model of “continuous improvement” that is used by successful businesses, corporations, nonprofits organizations, and educational systems. Part of that corporate management model seems analogous to boot camp in the the military: rough up the new recruits, break them down into quivering messes, then start again almost from scratch, rebuilding the “cherries” into lean, mean killing machines. Or consider the methods of a developer like KB Homes: come in with bulldozers, tear up the hillsides, devastate whatever ecosystem might have been there previously, and make a lot of money selling houses to nervous white folks fleeing the city.
Charter schools are the Holy Grail of many “school reformers” such as Broad and Gates. They have also come to be known as places where the “right people” (i.e. not disabled, not sight-impaired, not hearing-impaired, not mentally or emotionally challenged, not in any kind of trouble with the law) might get a better education. At least the lucky ones accepted to charters will be away from all “those people.”
And to make way for charters — well, as a friend who was in U.S. Army Special Forces used to say: “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.”
Could disruption, then, be a goal of our superintendent when he proposes to summarily move the entire staff of the largest elementary school in the country to another school? Or when he proposes to summarily close an entire program such as adult education, which is intrinsic to the social and economic fiber of Los Angeles?
Well, it depends on how you mean “disruption.”
Thomas W. Payzant does training for the Broad Academy. He also used to be superintendent of Boston public schools. Payzan says that BSA (Broad Superintendents Academy) graduates must be ready to shake districts up. “You don’t go into a leadership role with a notion that you’re just going to coast… You want to be able to show improvement, and often improvement in the education sector means change that will make some people very uncomfortable and will not be popular.”
Bring in the bulldozers.
A Broad critic named James Horn (associate professor of education policy at Cambridge College in Massachusetts) has a blog for educators: Schools Matter. Horn believes that Broad and other venture philanthropists are “wielding influence not to help public institutions, but to destroy public institutions, or take control of them… This is a dangerous place, where corporations and government get mixed up.”
Just how dangerous? I, and anyone in LAUSD’s adult and career education program, can tell you. In December we all got word that Dr. Deasy had recommended that the budget for the Division of Adult and Career Education be cut to zero, along with early childhood education and several other programs.
(For more on this, including videos on protests against the proposed zeroing of adult ed, including videos by me, click here: http://saveadulted.wordpress.com/)
One conspiracy theory that drifted through my e-mail was that Deasy was using the budget crisis as a pretext to serve a secret pro-Broad agenda. Think about it. The programs he was trying to eliminate help support the success of non-charter K-12 programs, in the following ways: 1. Adult education helps drop-outs graduate and helps parents help their kids in their studies; 2. Early childhood education helps kids from economically challenged families get a better chance in school. By demolishing those buttresses, Broad-I-mean-Deasy-and-all-the-other-Broadies could help bring on more failure for non-charter K-12, thus being able to more easily say, “See? Traditional K-12 programs aren’t working. Let’s make this a charter school district.”
I can also imagine Dr. Deasy and Eli Broad saying, behind closed doors, “Hmmm… there’s a lot of nice real estate sitting under those occupational centers and adult education centers. I’ll bet they would make real nice charter schools. If it weren’t for all those damn… PEOPLE.”
Photo by Michael Eivaz
I’m just saying.
And now I get the following email from a sender too nervous to leave his or her name at the bottom:
(Dated February 19, 2010)
Hi All, TWO VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGES!!!!1. We can’t let the Mayor change boundaries that will have a negative impact on our Board member support.
We have to get this info out fast and have as many people at the meetings as possible. The meeting is scheduled for this Tuesday the 21st at 6pm at Sepulveda Middle School. Call 213-241-6387 and let them know you plan to attend. Please see the attachments. I have also placed a link to additional information below:
http://www.larchmontbuzz.com/hancock-park-news/next-redistricting-process-lausd/
2. In Addition
Help Save the LAUSD by Removing Dr. John Deasy as SuperintendentPlease write letters to the board members asking them to ask Dr Deasy to tender his resignation.Why:1. He has not demonstrated the ability for reasonable fiscal decisions i.e. proposing the elimination of Adult and Career Education, ESL, Early childhood, etc.2. He finds it necessary to ask for a steep tax increase to balance the school budget on the backs of property owners instead of finding other creative alternatives.3. He has demonstrated poor judgment in handling the child abuse scandal at Miramonte from the beginning.4. Under his watch he allowed the district to break state law by waiting a year to tell California’s teacher credentialing agency that it was firing an instructor under investigation for alleged lewd acts with students.5. Before promoting him to the position of Superintendent the Board of Education failed to have a process — internal or external — for the most important job in public education in the United States right now.
Gentle reader, it is certainly up to you whether or not you would like to join the efforts to fight town hall (Villaraigosa’s redistricting proposals) or recall Superintendent John Deasy. But I will tell you this: My wife has excellent instincts about people, and is a pretty good judge of character. And she tells me that both Villaraigosa and Dr. John Deasy give her “the creeps.”
I will also go out on a limb and make a prediction. I predict that in attacking adult education, Dr. Deasy and the “Broadies” on the LAUSD school board have made a fatal strategic error that has exposed them as wrong-headed corporate elitists who do not know, understand, or truly care about the communities they purport to serve. I believe history will show that attacking adult education was Broad-I-mean-Deasy’s bridge too far. It was an act of hubris that — at the Board of Education’s raucous meeting on February 14 — was roundly and justly rebuked by a tag team of celebrities, elected officials, and a military veteran or two. Even the relatively conservative Daily News has come out foursquare in support of adult education.
I think Deasy’s term as superintendent will be as short as it is messy. Hopefully when the Board of Education chooses Deasy’s replacement, they will be more enlightened and will not take whatever corporate whore Eli Broad pushes their way. Hopefully they will think first of the people in the communities they serve, and less about the deep pockets of vulture philanthropists.
Hopefully we will one day have a truly effective system of public education that is not a subsidiary of private corporations. Because if history shows us anything, private corporations do not necessarily have in mind “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” What they really have in mind is profit.
My vote: Let’s keep public education a non-profit organization.
John's Room 
Great job! Beautifully done! Deasy is a Venus fly trap!
I think he’s more of a Trojan horse.
I bow down to you, Mr. Mears, gonzo AND solid. You’re ringing a bell that can still ring, this is a perfect offering! Wale up LA there’s a crack in the school distinct … There’s a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in…
Yay!!!!
Well, thank you, Chance LaRue? And how did you come to find this blog?
Obsessive search and destroy mission. Gathering research for Perdaily.com and to share in comments that follow media reports . We who do the Internet reporting and blogs are the only source of viable information on school districts . There is a great deal more parents becoming involved and one hopes this evil empire is coming to an overdue end.
John Deasy must Go
I have been an employee of LAUSD since 1990. Currently I am a high school teacher and have no confidence in our leadership. Deasy is out of touch and is not qualified to run this district. Can someone please check his credentials. When was the last time he taught in a classroom? What district?
I hereby place my Vote of No Confidence for Mr. Deasy. He must GO!
I intend to present a motion to UTLA’s Valley West area next week that Deasy be terminated as superintendent.
please be thorough and cite specifics. Particularlly his practice of simply placing teachers in empty buildings with no basic rights due to falsce accusaations. And the fact that these so called efforts to protect children are thinly disguised efforts to disrupt and dismantle schools . Weere behind you
What’s amazing to me is what he has been able to get away with. Where’s the public scrutiny of the way he abuses teachers?
Thank you for saying what I have been thinking for along time. Great research. Please keep up the good work.
PS. – there will be a Town Hall Meeting at the Bell High School Campus on Thursday @ 6pm to discuss the current crises.
By “the current crisis,” do you mean Deasy’s efforts to vaporize adult ed?
Yes I did, thanks.
Ah, good, so is this meeting at Bell HS being widely publicized? I unfortunately can’t attend, as I have another activist thingie in the S.F. Valley at 4 PM on Thurs. I would put up a note at saveadulted.org. If you’re on Facebook, you can create an event & invite people you know on FB. If you’re not on FB, I would recommend it as a good organizing tool.
J.
Mr. Mears, you are actually tempered and perhaps missing some key points which is understandable given the disruption factor. I. Certainly hadn’t considered some of your insights and they do make terrible sense. I believe Deasy, acting as emissary for the vultures, has one very urgent priority: Deprfessionalizng teachers. We know how philathropists loathe to pat workers,
He has done very little to conceal his contempt for teachers, and said “After 5 years of service anteacherbis no use to me.” Of course Deasy doesnt know much about pedagogy. Hes more of an elitist grifter. I suspect a teacher doesn’t hit her strides until year 3 and isn’t excellent until year 4 or 5– of course, attrition bears out the stress and uncertainty many feel in the trenches. The students do a magnificent job weeding out teachers who cannot keep up with the demands in overcrowded classrooms. Many decide to work in other fields , a lot get tenure after two years and insinuate themselves into the cronyism that most school districts seemed infested with. These bad teachers are promoted. They become bad administrators and a cursory look at LAUSD in the headlines bears out the incompetence and corruption undermining our mission. There is this pathological hatred for teachers these people seem to simmer with. They are paid twice as much, more even, to do considerably less in a workplace where their comportment goes unchecked. When misconduct is detected, the perverse Lausd tradition is to promote the administrator who has embezzled a million from school, harassed and mistreated parents and teachers, who fail to supervise certain teachers, especially their pets. This is is how Berndt got away with what he did for so long. He knew which children he could victimize and which administrators he could manipulate. The leadership at Miramonte was overextended. Only four of them were assigned to this campus, one of the largest ES in the state. That’s about half of what the norm is. Nevertheless, the fact that Berndt was scouting new victims at recess, dressed like a deviant Micky Mouse and parents had indeed complained recently about the photos that he had not gotten consent to take and they were creepy according to one dad who demanded his daughter be removed from Bent …I mean Berndt’s class.
. To save money in the 90s the district agreed that discipline could be removed from employees’ files after 4years. This is not something most teachers know. But pervs know and diligently erase all traces of evidence ASAP. Since a principal usually stays at a school around 4 years it’s possible that many never have a clue who the teachers are. We suspect like Deasy’s staff of obsessively groomed thugs in Employee relations, they too are criminally indifferent. The staff, I am sure, was aware that something was not right. At least those who witnessed Berndt trolling for new victims.
And Deasy knew they knew , which is why he spent over 5 million bucks to have them removed for debriefing. In other words threats and intimidation couched in sanitized semantics. I know too well what happens when a teacher breaks the silence. I reported abuse and noncompliance and LAUSD/utla allowed me to be mobbed, then railroaded into a rubber room where two years later I continue to be maligned and menaced by the white chalk criminals in LD and the upper ranks. I receive two or three letters with resignation forms a week, and that’s because I have been diligently documenting everything and they know I know what’s up. I understand how teachers would be afraid to face the Kafkesque nightmare I am living. I probably will be unemployable, I will lose my home and my health has been ruined along with my reputation. The charges against me are actually laughable. The district did ask CTC to revoke my credential several times. They refused, noting there was no evidence to support this and a woman I spoke with admitted that LAUSD uses the credentials to intimidate teachers. We now know they will use them as leverage to get perverts’ resignation.
I have nothing but contempt for UTLA but it had nothing to do with the agreements Berndt and Hernandez were generously offered. And John Deasy oversees every employee severed from the district. He is well known for his tantrums.
However, he did not create the beast, he just equivocates about its dirty deeds and leads the charge in it’s ongoing assault on ethical educators. His thugs threaten the parents with deportation when they forget their place and confront these crimes. deasy knows his days are numbered, so he milks his conflicts of interest for an income that is best described as obscene so he can get on to his next scheme.
.
I have this theory that his deflection of blame will cripple him and Broad. Cortines gift was being so benign and ambivalent in his Hermes tie everyone saw him as a gay grandpa. Deasy has a different temperament. I suspect he may actually have a conscious. That would explain the fatal defensiveness that won him formidable enemies last month. The Sheriff is none too thrilled with efforts to thwart his investigation nor was he happy to be blamed for Deasy’s wanton refusal to inform parents about the crimes committed upon their children. It seems to me Broad and Gates got more than they bargained for. Deasy is stepping through a mine field of liability . It’s not just the sexual proclivities and sadistic propensity of I’d say 1% of the teachers. There is the incompetence of administrators, which is rampant now that 50% of them are also Broad graduates trained to unload Teacher’s at any and all costs. With a 26% growth spurt in their ranks and the cleansing of thousands of educators and depots acting like little Hitlers on campus, we can’t see much improvement on the horizon.
Those rubber rooms are filling up, and half the inmates held there illegally to prop up a pretense of due process are innocent victims of retaliatory discipline and/Or ageism
A class action law suit is evolving and many outside agencies are documenting the harassment and broken laws LAUSD arrogantly assumes they will get away with. Moreover there is Miramonte, Belmont HS with nerve damaging gas leaking up into the buildings. (see Full Dicluser/ Belmont HS) . Toxic school sites pepper the urban blight beneath the 10 Freeway, and students are already resisting test factories, moving into online schools and I’ll bet looking to GED to liberate them from the horrors of a fascist HS where tardy kid is treated as truant and fined $250 his parents cannot pay. Where lapd rejects and deans deny them all civil rights and they herded like livestock.
There is only one organization so corrupt, so incompetent it could possibly bankrupt Broad, Gates and Walton and that’s the LA school system.
Of course well have to flush them out of hiding as you do here. It is becoming common knowledge now as the sleeping giant wakes at last: Parents are rising up to protect their offspring. I can only hope more teachers do the same. No job is worth complicity in such heinous acts. With OWS sleeping outside HQ tonight on the cold concrete, much to Deasy’s consternation, we will run him out sooner than later but expect more of the same. These philanthropists are not the type to cut their losses. I will prevail in my cases eventually, and plan to open up a small school for thrown away youth that emphasizes arts and public service. I I may even have room and board to spare them from group homes and foster care with exploitive parents. Some of us know the secret to joy is being committed to the greater good, so eve if I am hurled in to skid row I will devote myself to that. I will trudge up to Beaudry every day in my rags to rant so the suits know who and what they are.. What’d ya say to pounding the pavement with us this summer as we go into the hood to stir the working poor masses into action? we should orobably work on repealing gov. Code 820 while we are at it. Oh yea visit http://www.perdaily.com. Godspeed
Wow. Amazing comment. When I’m not in constant crisis mode I hope to see more of perdaily.com. But for now, a thousand thanks.
John
Let’s be sure to include Deasy’s flippant remarks about books.
John Deasy’s Queen Antoinette moment: “let them eat ebooks”
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/09/john-deasys-queen-antoinette-moment-let.html
What were his exact words, do you know?
He said libraries would be irrelevant soon as books will move to electronic format.
Like, Wow. This is very chilling.
Please read this letter I just posted on the Venice Patch: http://venice.patch.com/articles/open-letter-to-lausd-superintendent-john-deasy
AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN DEASY, SUPERINTENDENT OF LOS ANGELES UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT ~
Dear Dr Deasy:
She told us she’d go down with the ship,
…but you’ve forced her to walk the gang plank.
WHAT IS GOING ON HERE??!!
You have on Los Angeles’ very own westside, snuggled smack dab within the boundaries of LAUSD District 3, a “Model School Of Excellence” by your very own designation. Palms Middle School is a learning community of identified gifted-learners (GATES) and local neighborhood learners all rolled into three fabulous, seamless, Schools That Work. Children at Palms Middle School are learning by any measure you take, and measure them you have. They spend an inordinate percentage of their school lives being sized up and scrutinized and measured out for the tailored suit of standardized rote learning that cloaks them. And yet, despite so many self-indulgent metrices, the endless gauging, plumbing and measuring, you seem never quite to have *noticed* the results of your tests.
Right here in your midst lies Palms Middle School, the very shining paradigm of a SCHOOL THAT IS WORKING. Children are learning, their test scores are high, and climbing steadily upward every year, importantly among every socioeconomic and scholastic strata. Any way you look at it, the entire school shows consistent, impressive gains. While other local charter schools may claim higher overall scores, these are average numbers that do not stand up to strata-specific scrutiny. Palms Middle School educates children, and educates them better than others, regardless of socioeconomic status. This is a truly egalitarian school, truly diverse and integrated. By collecting together in one vessel so many excellent students and teachers in an atmosphere of high expectation, superior pedagogy and committed involvement, absolutely everyone’s boat floats here: gifted, special-needs, rich and poor alike. This is not a rarefied community of economically or academically pre-selected, privileged learners; it is a school where very nearly half the students are Title I compliant (i.e., “poor”); an authentic slice of the city. The children here are happy, they are healthy and friendly and accomplished. This institution is a blazing success story by any metric you care to engage.
But. Has anyone noticed??? Have YOU noticed?
Because while you have been out patrolling whole school communities closed down for the sins of one or two among them, behind and beneath your gaze has been this – and likely several other – schools where competence has been eked from pitifully inadequate budgets year after year after year: to your utter and willful disregard.
Sending insult after injury, you have squeezed this school’s budget dryer than a skeleton core, and then extracted its entitled Title I funding as well, sending an administrative pall overnight of the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars onto the sodden desk of the principal. After forcing her to do with less and less until there was no more to do less with, you then cut into her work staff, the vaunted vital “team” of support staff so highly extolled by you for your own needs. Not satisfied with weakening her ship to this dangerous degree, you have sent this 35 year public school inspirational veteran of alchemic miracles, notice that she may be hired back after RIF-ing, but only at reduced personal salary.
But here’s the thing. This is an administrator who has commanded a ship that works, Excellently — and you very simply have just not noticed. Never have you asked: What is Working here. Never have you visited. Never have you investigated what principles, skills, tools, techniques have rendered this school such an admirable well-oiled “School Of Excellence” (LAUSD’s designation). Instead of honoring, scrutinizing and studying this venerable institution that is performing so excellently, you are willfully sabotaging the ship. You have withdrawn vital monies. You have removed critical staff and faculty. You have even whittled away at the personal salary of the one you are requiring ever-more work of amidst infinitely fewer resources.
You have forced Palms Middle Schools’ principal to walk the plank and she has jumped. She has jumped ship, leaving us rudderless.
This is more than a tragedy, it is censurable and unconscionable. As a parent, I am appealing to you personally, entreating that you inquire after the means of excellence of this school immediately, yesterday – before it is too late. There is a treasure trove of excellence housed within this school in the form of its principal and much support staff as well that you seem poised to permit to disperse heedlessly. This is not acceptable. Excellence is not so easily achieved that we any of us can afford to let it dissipate.
PLEASE PAY ATTENTION to the determinants of Palms Middle School that are working. Do not permit its principal to be lost to us. Do not dismiss vital support staff and slash its budget and faculty. This ship is foundered and can sustain no more insult. SAVE OUR SHIP. Sustain Palms Middle School.
OMG!! The article posted by SDR on May 3, 2012 has EXACTLY my same plea. Dodson Middle School is like the sister school of Palms Middle School, only we are located in the most southern part of LAUSD. Our school has also been a “Distinguished School” and consists of Magnet Gifted/High Achieving students, School for the Advanced Studies (SAS), and a “main” population of resident students. Our test scores have increased each year; last year reaching an API of 840; all without the funds that the other low performing schools receive. We have never been asked how we do it, instead we are constantly told how we need to change and to “conform.”
Unfortunately, our school has suffered the same fate. I am in the midst of receiving an “Administrative Transfer” after 23 years of dedicated service to Dodson. I have never received an unsatisfactory evaluation and I have the respect of the teachers and parents. At this time, I can not disclose my situation because I fear the “LAUSD Mafia” backlash. I am scheduled to go back on basis next week; however, I do not know where I will be placed yet. I am have a single income and I am the only one providing health benefits to my kids. What I can tell you is that it goes MUCH deeper then just Deasy. The amount of political power the Board has is insurmountable; not to mention, unethical. Jobs are being given to Board member’s children and extended friends and family who are under-experienced and undeserving. One of the Board members has even taught Law and Ethics at the University level to many of our own teachers, but seems to be able to justify his actions as being just.
I worry, not only for the employees that have been horribly treated during the last several years, but more importantly, I worry about this generation of students who are receiving the poorest level of education because they are squeezed into small classrooms with huge class numbers, lack of adequate materials, the loss of support staff (ie. counselors, nurses, psychologists, office and custodial staff), and so much more. We can’t take back what has already been done to their education. But I believe that we can’t just shut up and pretend that this is not going on. My children are part of this generation and I am afraid for their futures.
I believe that it will take the support from all the “little people” in the District to stand up and make some noise. We need to stop this form of ‘LAUSD Bullying.’
I would love to be a part of spreading the word. I make bumper stickers and tshirts let me know.val
Bob asks Can anybody name where and when and for how long did John Deasy teach in a k-12 Classroom. The closest IO can find was a job as principal in upstate New York while, getting more phoney credits at a nearby University.
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